Letters from Potsdam

By Fiesta Publishing

The Editor's father, Colonel John S. Wise, was a member of General George C. Marshall's staff. He accompanied Marshall to the July-August 1945 Potsdam Conference, outside of Berlin, where he served as the U.S. Army's liaison officer.

Col. Wise wrote sixteen detailed letters to his wife, Elizabeth Thompson Wise, describing not

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fiesta Publishing
• Release date: Jan 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9780999766255

Book preview

LETTERS

FROM

POTSDAM

COLONEL JOHN S. WISE’S IMPRESSIONS OF THE 1945 BERLIN CONFERENCE

EDITED BY E. TAYLOE WISE

Letters from Potsdam: Colonel John S. Wise’s Impressions of the 1945 Berlin Conference

Copyright © 2022 E. Tayloe Wise

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Any reference to historical events and names of people or places, have all been verified by the author.

ISBN: 978-0-9997662-1-7 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-9997662-5-5 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021919237

Letters authored by: Colonel John S. Wise

Edited by: E. Tayloe Wise

Photographs by: Colonel John S. Wise, U.S. Army Air Forces, and U.S.

Army Signal Corps. Used by permission.

Cover image by: Dan Harshberger of Dan Harshberger Graphic Design Studio

Interior design by: Master Design Marketing, LLC

First printing edition 2022

Printed in the United States of America.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Fiesta Publishing

PO Box 44984

Phoenix, AZ 85064

www.fiestapublishing.com

DEDICATION

To All the Men and Women in both our military and Federal government who, during World War II, made victory in Europe and the Pacific possible. This is also dedicated to all my buddies who fought in combat with me in Vietnam. Also, to Donna Nardi, who encouraged me to finish this long-delayed project.

FOREWORD

All wars are different. All wars are the same. Those who fight and bear the brunt of combat still die, bleed, scream and cry, and are maimed both physically and psychologically. My Father was a member of the Greatest Generation, who fought and helped win the last great World War. I fought in Vietnam, which was lost by gutless politicians, who allowed 58,220 of us to die in vain. Since World War II ended, there hasn’t been a righteous war. Instead, our country has sent us off to bleed and die in so many remote parts of the world—Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia to name a few. My Father’s generation had a much more purposeful war—to utterly defeat both the Germans and the Japanese. To his generation it was a noble and honorable fight, which ended in the unconditional surrender of both combatants. Due to their maltreatment at Versailles in 1919, the Germans, bent on conquest of Europe during World War II, blamed and exterminated the Jews. The Japanese, desirous of conquering Asia, surprised us at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and then went on to brutally kill anyone in their path. More than one percent of American military POWs died in German and Italian POW camps, while 38.2% of U.S. military POWs died in Japanese camps.¹ Today, the religious cleansing of Christians by ISIS via their atrocious use of beheading is shocking, but the Japanese were also quite adept at barbaric decapitation with their curved swords.

The average age of the World War II combat soldier was 26—in Vietnam it was 22. In every other former American war, the troops had been older.² In Vietnam, the proportion of those surviving their wounds who were permanently disabled, usually by reason of amputations or other crippling consequences of their wounds, was higher than World War II.³ Yet, the average soldier was under fire for 240 days or so in Vietnam, much longer than his father had been during World War II.⁴ So, our wounds were worse and our time in battle was much more psychologically daunting. The 1944–45 Battle of the Bulge caught the Allied forces by surprise. Yet, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, American technology and air power allowed us to fight and react more quickly on the Vietnamese battlefield than our Fathers could in World War II, but it still didn’t give us a clue about the Tet Offensive of 1968. In sum, war is like a game of poker. You may have the winning hand, but the bluffer can throw a monkey wrench into your plans and sweep you off the deck before you realize what’s happening.

My Father, a 1926 Virginia Military Institute (VMI) graduate, who was ordered to active duty in 1942 with the rank of Captain, wanted to go into battle, but was assigned to the Army Air Corps and trained aviators at a posh country club in Boca Raton, Florida and later at an airfield in North Carolina. Instead of being ordered into combat, he kept being promoted until he found himself at the Pentagon working under George C. Marshall a fellow, but older, 1901 VMI graduate. When I returned home after my college graduation in May 1968, my Father told me that he had done his job educating me and now I had to join the military. I was a young and extremely naive college graduate when I enlisted and was inducted three weeks later in June 1968. Vietnam veterans were the best educated troops our nation had ever fielded—79% of all enlisted men in Vietnam had a high school diploma, while only 24% of the Good War enlisted personnel had a high school diploma, and about 20% of World War II recruits were functionally illiterate.⁵ Later, I would learn that 65% of us who served in Vietnam were volunteers versus only 35% of World War II veterans.⁶ Still, I thought the Army would give me a safe desk-type job. While I never imagined that I would end up in Vietnam, or much less participate in combat, I was ordered to Indochina as a combat infantryman and later became a combat medic winning many more combat medals (3 for Heroism) than my Father ever earned.

My Father was intensely patriotic and emerged from World War II with great hope that he and his generation would fundamentally change America. And they truly did. I returned home with a jaundiced and untrusting view of my Father’s generation whom I eyed with skepticism, suspicion, and great anger for having both misled and deceived us. My Father and his generation, most of whom have now passed on, won the BIG one. They came home to ticker tape parades and celebrations. They had an enormous pride in what they had accomplished.

My generation of vets felt incredibly betrayed by our leaders. Treated as pariahs and baby killers and spit upon when they came home, many Vietnam veterans faced hard times with not much to look forward to except maintaining our silence as if we had done something wrong.

Yet most Americans had largely forgotten that Allied bombing raids over Dresden and Tokyo during World War II killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. There were no bands or parades welcoming us. We hung our heads in shame and silently cried inside. We tended to believe that duplicitous politicians and egghead know-it-all bureaucrats (the Best and the Brightest?) had both needlessly wasted our lives and used us as expendable pawns with our hands tied behind our backs in a global gunfight at the Vietnam corral.

After all, one of the main reasons Nixon was elected in 1968 was due to the fact that he promised Americans he had a secret plan to get us out of Vietnam. Some 36,956 had died in the Southeast Asian jungles and rice paddies prior to his election, yet another 21,257 (57% of those who were already dead!) were sacrificed under his and Ford’s watch, as peace negotiators uselessly argued about the size of a table in Paris.⁷ Some plan.

My Father’s generation came home from the war, started businesses, and made America a worldwide economic giant. Most of my generation came home and faded into the background. Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD, Agent Orange exposure, and committed suicide at alarming rates— perhaps, at least equal to the amount of war deaths and now only 31.4% of Vietnam Vets are still alive.⁸

My Father and his generation of veterans didn’t have to worry about exposure to deadly wartime chemicals (like mustard gas which had been used in World War I), and while a small percentage of World War II veterans did suffer from shell shock, my Father and his close friends never mentioned to me that the Greatest Generation had a suicide problem.

My Father and his friends exalted at winning. I, and my Vietnam comrades, bit our tongues and withdrew into our caves, afraid to come out or even admit we had been a part of the war. Now, more than 45 years after Saigon fell, we are beginning to die off just like our Fathers and FINALLY people are approaching us and thanking us for our role in Vietnam.

The following letters, written from Potsdam by my Father, provide a look at the state of Berlin and Germany in 1945. The Cold War was about to begin. The signs were there and, I think, my Father saw them and what they portended for the future.

Disclaimer: In 1945, when the Editor’s Father wrote these letters, there was no term such as Politically Correct. Therefore, the reader may be offended by some terms and personal comments made by JSW found in this account. The use of the words is attributed to the way people talked, thought, or wrote during that period of time. Also, the letters were for private reading, so the author did not intend them to be offensive to anyone, especially to his wife. The Editor, who does not intend to offend his readers, has included them for historical purposes as to the thoughts not only of his Father, but also other members of the Greatest Generation.

____________

¹ http://www.lindavdahl.com/FrontPage_Links/pows_of_the_japanese.htm. Accessed 4/9/2016.

² Dunnigan, James F. And Albert A. Nofi. Dirty Little Secrets of the Vietnam War (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 3, 12. [Henceforth, Dunnigan]

³ Dunnigan, 3.

⁴ Ibid, 250.

⁵ Ibid., 4.

⁶ Ibid., 3, 18.

⁷ National Archives and Records Administration. Statistical Information about Fatal Field Casualties of the Vietnam War - Electronic Records Reference Report. Vietnam Conflict Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) Extract File. Accessed April 29, 2016.

⁸ Poster entitled This Was Vietnam issued by The National Vietnam War Museum, Weatherford, TX, 2021.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN SERGEANT WISE

MAJOR EVENTS IN 1945

EXPLANATORY NOTE

LETTERS

LETTERS #1 & #2

LETTER #3

LETTER #4

LETTER #5

LETTER #6

LETTER #7

LETTER #8

LETTER #9

LETTER #10

LETTER #11

LETTER #12

LETTER #13

LETTER #14

LETTER #15

LETTER #16

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES ON ABBREVIATIONS

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

APPENDIX III

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ABOUT THE EDITOR E. TAYLOE WISE

INTRODUCTION

Berlin — July 1945. The war in Europe was over. The war with Japan would end in two cataclysmic blasts on August 6 and 9, 1945. It was the beginning of the Cold War—only we didn’t know that it had started. The inkling was there—what George Kennan would describe in his now famous Long Telegram sent from Moscow to the U. S. State Department on February 22, 1946. It was, as Kennan later elaborated, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers of the Communist conspiracy.⁹ Less than two weeks later, on March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill would state unequivocally that an Iron Curtain had descended across Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic.

In July 1945 the Big Three—Churchill, Stalin, and Truman—would meet in Germany at Potsdam, a Berlin suburb, to settle how the spoils would be divided up. The July 17 to August 2, 1945, Conference at Berlin, aka the Potsdam Conference, would, ultimately, be a failure. Stalin and his Russian army were already in control of Eastern Europe, and he wasn’t about to be dislodged no matter what platitudes, or financial inducements, were thrown his way.

The Editor’s Father, John S. Wise, was fortunate to be working in the U.S. War Department under General of the Army, George C. Marshall, and accompanied Marshall and his staff to Potsdam. During the brief two weeks of the Potsdam Conference, Wise, who served as an Army Liaison Officer, wrote a series of sixteen highly descriptive letters, dated from July 16 to July 30, 1945, to his wife, Elizabeth T. Wise, who lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. Although the letters were subject to censorship, the Editor has found only two pseudonyms out of the 93 individuals mentioned in them. Less than two pages of the letters have been excerpted, as those portions from several different letters, contained personal family information that was not pertinent to the overall scope of the history of those times.

____________

⁹ George F. Kennan. Memoirs 1925-1950 (Boston: Little & Brown, 1967), 294.

BIOGRAPHY OF JOHN SERGEANT WISE

(1905–1974)